Showing posts with label Politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Politics. Show all posts

Friday 24 March 2017

George Orwell - "Notes on Nationalism"

These days everyone is talking about Nationalism. Whether it's Scottish Nationalism, Donald Trump's Nationalism, or European nationalism, nationalism seems to be everywhere. That has reminded me of this brilliant essay by George Orwell, who lived at a time when, whatever problems we have today, nationalism was a much more powerful and dangerous force. In it he skilfully dissects why nationalism is a problem, as a mental approach and emotional contagion. He makes various points often mistaken in our contemporary approach: about the difference between nationalism and patriotism, about the universal risk of nationalism, that 'nationalism' can apply to entities other than nations (in the strict sense), that one can have 'negative nationalism' as much as positive, and that the struggle against nationalism is an individual moral, spiritual, intellectual and linguistic struggle as well as a matter of political choice. It is also a brilliant piece of history, giving one a sense, at least from one perspective, of what it felt like to be facing out into the world as an Englishman in 1945.

Orwell's 'nationalism', in its generalised sense, bears a close relation to what a generalised notion of 'racism' would look like, if we used the term to also cover analogous stereotyping fallacies such as sexism, anti-semitism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, Christianophobia, homophobia, etc, etc. This is particularly in his formulation given in the first underlined sentence below. However, he then focuses on his second formulation given immediately after, which has a very different emphasis, and so I think more work is needed to complete an analogous identification of the form of ur-racism, such as people mean when they say Islamophobic attacks are racist, and which would unite a range of similar moral and intellectual stereotyping fallacies the way Orwell's 'nationalism' does in its overlapping areas. 


Finally, if you do accept Orwell's analysis then it becomes clear that in 2017 almost all our current, British, large-scale political arguments involve nationalism on both sides, generally the more, the more virulent the argument and fundamental the issue, as agreed rational facts dissolve into basic value and tribal commitments. Needless to say the Scottish Independence debate involves enough nationalism to drown us all in, though largely among its fiercer partisans. The majority of ordinary voters, inoculated by their comparative lack of interest in politics, whether formally nationalist or unionist, are probably still largely free of it. The EU question has also clearly become a nationalist issue for both sides, the more rabid Remainers seem to have developed this rapidly, largely since the referendum was called, joining the longer-term, more obvious nationalism of the Ukippy variety. There seems to be something about defeat, or being in the minority that promotes foaming at the mouth. The rise and fall of nationalisms is also obvious from Orwell's essay. Some of the types of nationalism he describes have basically vanished, others are still very much with us, and we could probably add modern types that have emerged since his essay was written. But enough from me, on to Orwell's own words.

Somewhere or other Byron makes use of the French word longeur, and remarks in passing that
though in England we happen not to have the word, we have the thing in considerable profusion. In the same way, there is a habit of mind which is now so widespread that it affects our thinking on nearly every subject, but which has not yet been given a name. As the nearest existing equivalent I have chosen the word ‘nationalism’, but it will be seen in a moment that I am not using it in quite the ordinary sense, if only because the emotion I am speaking about does not always attach itself to what is called a nation — that is, a single race or a geographical area. It can attach itself to a church or a class, or it may work in a merely negative sense, against something or other and without the need for any positive object of loyalty.
By ‘nationalism’ I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad’(1). But secondly — and this is much more important — I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests. Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.
So long as it is applied merely to the more notorious and identifiable nationalist movements in Germany, Japan, and other countries, all this is obvious enough. Confronted with a phenomenon like Nazism, which we can observe from the outside, nearly all of us would say much the same things about it. But here I must repeat what I said above, that I am only using the word ‘nationalism’ for lack of a better. Nationalism, in the extended sense in which I am using the word, includes such movements and tendencies as Communism, political Catholicism, Zionism, Antisemitism, Trotskyism and Pacifism. It does not necessarily mean loyalty to a government or a country, still less to one's own country, and it is not even strictly necessary that the units in which it deals should actually exist. To name a few obvious examples, Jewry, Islam, Christendom, the Proletariat and the White Race are all of them objects of passionate nationalistic feeling: but their existence can be seriously questioned, and there is no definition of any one of them that would be universally accepted.
It is also worth emphasising once again that nationalist feeling can be purely negative. There are, for example, Trotskyists who have become simply enemies of the U.S.S.R. without developing a corresponding loyalty to any other unit. When one grasps the implications of this, the nature of what I mean by nationalism becomes a good deal clearer. A nationalist is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige. He may be a positive or a negative nationalist — that is, he may use his mental energy either in boosting or in denigrating — but at any rate his thoughts always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs and humiliations. He sees history, especially contemporary history, as the endless rise and decline of great power units, and every event that happens seems to him a demonstration that his own side is on the upgrade and some hated rival is on the downgrade. But finally, it is important not to confuse nationalism with mere worship of success. The nationalist does not go on the principle of simply ganging up with the strongest side. On the contrary, having picked his side, he persuades himself that it is the strongest, and is able to stick to his belief even when the facts are overwhelmingly against him. Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also — since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself — unshakeably certain of being in the right.
Now that I have given this lengthy definition, I think it will be admitted that the habit of mind I am talking about is widespread among the English intelligentsia, and more widespread there than among the mass of the people. For those who feel deeply about contemporary politics, certain topics have become so infected by considerations of prestige that a genuinely rational approach to them is almost impossible. Out of the hundreds of examples that one might choose, take this question: Which of the three great allies, the U.S.S.R., Britain and the USA, has contributed most to the defeat of Germany? In theory, it should be possible to give a reasoned and perhaps even a conclusive answer to this question. In practice, however, the necessary calculations cannot be made, because anyone likely to bother his head about such a question would inevitably see it in terms of competitive prestige. He would therefore start by deciding in favour of Russia, Britain or America as the case might be, and only after this would begin searching for arguments that seemed to support his case. And there are whole strings of kindred questions to which you can only get an honest answer from someone who is indifferent to the whole subject involved, and whose opinion on it is probably worthless in any case. Hence, partly, the remarkable failure in our time of political and military prediction. It is curious to reflect that out of al the ‘experts’ of all the schools, there was not a single one who was able to foresee so likely an event as the Russo-German Pact of 1939(2). And when news of the Pact broke, the most wildly divergent explanations were of it were given, and predictions were made which were falsified almost immediately, being based in nearly every case not on a study of probabilities but on a desire to make the U.S.S.R. seem good or bad, strong or weak. Political or military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for an appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of nationalistic loyalties(3). And aesthetic judgements, especially literary judgements, are often corrupted in the same way as political ones. It would be difficult for an Indian Nationalist to enjoy reading Kipling or for a Conservative to see merit in Mayakovsky, and there is always a temptation to claim that any book whose tendency one disagrees with must be a bad book from a literary point of view. People of strongly nationalistic outlook often perform this sleight of hand without being conscious of dishonesty.
In England, if one simply considers the number of people involved, it is probable that the dominant form of nationalism is old-fashioned British jingoism. It is certain that this is still widespread, and much more so than most observers would have believed a dozen years ago. However, in this essay I am concerned chiefly with the reactions of the intelligentsia, among whom jingoism and even patriotism of the old kind are almost dead, though they now seem to be reviving among a minority. Among the intelligentsia, it hardly needs saying that the dominant form of nationalism is Communism — using this word in a very loose sense, to include not merely Communist Party members, but ‘fellow travellers’ and russophiles generally. A Communist, for my purpose here, is one who looks upon the U.S.S.R. as his Fatherland and feels it his duty t justify Russian policy and advance Russian interests at all costs. Obviously such people abound in England today, and their direct and indirect influence is very great. But many other forms of nationalism also flourish, and it is by noticing the points of resemblance between different and even seemingly opposed currents of thought that one can best get the matter into perspective.
Ten or twenty years ago, the form of nationalism most closely corresponding to Communism today was political Catholicism. Its most outstanding exponent — though he was perhaps an extreme case rather than a typical one — was G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton was a writer of considerable talent who whose to suppress both his sensibilities and his intellectual honesty in the cause of Roman Catholic propaganda. During the last twenty years or so of his life, his entire output was in reality an endless repetition of the same thing, under its laboured cleverness as simple and boring as ‘Great is Diana of the Ephesians.’ Every book that he wrote, every scrap of dialogue, had to demonstrate beyond the possibility of mistake the superiority of the Catholic over the Protestant or the pagan. But Chesterton was not content to think of this superiority as merely intellectual or spiritual: it had to be translated into terms of national prestige and military power, which entailed an ignorant idealisation of the Latin countries, especially France. Chesterton had not lived long in France, and his picture of it — as a land of Catholic peasants incessantly singing the Marseillaise over glasses of red wine — had about as much relation to reality as Chu Chin Chow has to everyday life in Baghdad. And with this went not only an enormous overestimation of French military power (both before and after 1914-18 he maintained that France, by itself, was stronger than Germany), but a silly and vulgar glorification of the actual process of war. Chesterton's battle poems, such as Lepanto or The Ballad of Saint Barbara, make The Charge of the Light Brigade read like a pacifist tract: they are perhaps the most tawdry bits of bombast to be found in our language. The interesting thing is that had the romantic rubbish which he habitually wrote about France and the French army been written by somebody else about Britain and the British army, he would have been the first to jeer. In home politics he was a Little Englander, a true hater of jingoism and imperialism, and according to his lights a true friend of democracy. Yet when he looked outwards into the international field, he could forsake his principles without even noticing he was doing so. Thus, his almost mystical belief in the virtues of democracy did not prevent him from admiring Mussolini. Mussolini had destroyed the representative government and the freedom of the press for which Chesterton had struggled so hard at home, but Mussolini was an Italian and had made Italy strong, and that settled the matter. Nor did Chesterton ever find a word to say about imperialism and the conquest of coloured races when they were practised by Italians or Frenchmen. His hold on reality, his literary taste, and even to some extent his moral sense, were dislocated as soon as his nationalistic loyalties were involved.
Obviously there are considerable resemblances between political Catholicism, as exemplified by Chesterton, and Communism. So there are between either of these and for instance Scottish nationalism, Zionism, Antisemitism or Trotskyism. It would be an oversimplification to say that all forms of nationalism are the same, even in their mental atmosphere, but there are certain rules that hold good in all cases. The following are the principal characteristics of nationalist thought:
Obsession. As nearly as possible, no nationalist ever thinks, talks, or writes about anything except the superiority of his own power unit. It is difficult if not impossible for any nationalist to conceal his allegiance. The smallest slur upon his own unit, or any implied praise of a rival organization, fills him with uneasiness which he can relieve only by making some sharp retort. If the chosen unit is an actual country, such as Ireland or India, he will generally claim superiority for it not only in military power and political virtue, but in art, literature, sport, structure of the language, the physical beauty of the inhabitants, and perhaps even in climate, scenery and cooking. He will show great sensitiveness about such things as the correct display of flags, relative size of headlines and the order in which different countries are named(4). Nomenclature plays a very important part in nationalist thought. Countries which have won their independence or gone through a nationalist revolution usually change their names, and any country or other unit round which strong feelings revolve is likely to have several names, each of them carrying a different implication. The two sides of the Spanish Civil War had between them nine or ten names expressing different degrees of love and hatred. Some of these names (e. g. ‘Patriots’ for Franco-supporters, or ‘Loyalists’ for Government-supporters) were frankly question-begging, and there was no single one of the which the two rival factions could have agreed to use. All nationalists consider it a duty to spread their own language to the detriment of rival languages, and among English-speakers this struggle reappears in subtler forms as a struggle between dialects. Anglophobe-Americans will refuse to use a slang phrase if they know it to be of British origin, and the conflict between Latinizers and Germanizers often has nationalists motives behind it. Scottish nationalists insist on the superiority of Lowland Scots, and socialists whose nationalism takes the form of class hatred tirade against the B.B.C. accent and even the often gives the impression of being tinged by belief in symphatetic magic — a belief which probably comes out in the widespread custom of burning political enemies in effigy, or using pictures of them as targets in shooting galleries.
Instability. The intensity with which they are held does not prevent nationalist loyalties from being transferable. To begin with, as I have pointed out already, they can be and often are fastened up on some foreign country. One quite commonly finds that great national leaders, or the founders of nationalist movements, do not even belong to the country they have glorified. Sometimes they are outright foreigners, or more often they come from peripheral areas where nationality is doubtful. Examples are Stalin, Hitler, Napoleon, de Valera, Disraeli, Poincare, Beaverbrook. The Pan-German movement was in part the creation of an Englishman, Houston Chamberlain. For the past fifty or a hundred years, transferred nationalism has been a common phenomenon among literary intellectuals. With Lafcadio Hearne the transference was to Japan, with Carlyle and many others of his time to Germany, and in our own age it is usually to Russia. But the peculiarly interesting fact is that re-transference is also possible. A country or other unit which has been worshipped for years may suddenly become detestable, and some other object of affection may take its place with almost no interval. In the first version of H. G. Wells's Outline of History, and others of his writings about that time, one finds the United States praised almost as extravagantly as Russia is praised by Communists today: yet within a few years this uncritical admiration had turned into hostility. The bigoted Communist who changes in a space of weeks, or even days, into an equally bigoted Trotskyist is a common spectacle. In continental Europe Fascist movements were largely recruited from among Communists, and the opposite process may well happen within the next few years. What remains constant in the nationalist is his state of mind: the object of his feelings is changeable, and may be imaginary.
But for an intellectual, transference has an important function which I have already mentioned shortly in connection with Chesterton. It makes it possible for him to be much more nationalistic — more vulgar, more silly, more malignant, more dishonest — that he could ever be on behalf of his native country, or any unit of which he had real knowledge. When one sees the slavish or boastful rubbish that is written about Stalin, the Red Army, etc. by fairly intelligent and sensitive people, one realises that this is only possible because some kind of dislocation has taken place. In societies such as ours, it is unusual for anyone describable as an intellectual to feel a very deep attachment to his own country. Public opinion — that is, the section of public opinion of which he as an intellectual is aware — will not allow him to do so. Most of the people surrounding him are sceptical and disaffected, and he may adopt the same attitude from imitativeness or sheer cowardice: in that case he will have abandoned the form of nationalism that lies nearest to hand without getting any closer to a genuinely internationalist outlook. He still feels the need for a Fatherland, and it is natural to look for one somewhere abroad. Having found it, he can wallow unrestrainedly in exactly those emotions from which he believes that he has emancipated himself. God, the King, the Empire, the Union Jack — all the overthrown idols can reappear under different names, and because they are not recognised for what they are they can be worshipped with a good conscience. Transferred nationalism, like the use of scapegoats, is a way of attaining salvation without altering one's conduct.
Indifference to Reality. All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side. The Liberal News Chronicle published, as an example of shocking barbarity, photographs of Russians hanged by the Germans, and then a year or two later published with warm approval almost exactly similar photographs of Germans hanged by the Russians(5). It is the same with historical events. History is thought of largely in nationalist terms, and such things as the Inquisition, the tortures of the Star Chamber, the exploits of the English buccaneers (Sir Francis Drake, for instance, who was given to sinking Spanish prisoners alive), the Reign of Terror, the heroes of the Mutiny blowing hundreds of Indians from the guns, or Cromwell's soldiers slashing Irishwomen's faces with razors, become morally neutral or even meritorious when it is felt that they were done in the ‘right’ cause. If one looks back over the past quarter of a century, one finds that there was hardly a single year when atrocity stories were not being reported from some part of the world; and yet in not one single case were these atrocities — in Spain, Russia, China, Hungary, Mexico, Amritsar, Smyrna — believed in and disapproved of by the English intelligentsia as a whole. Whether such deeds were reprehensible, or even whether they happened, was always decided according to political predilection.
The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. For quite six years the English admirers of Hitler contrived not to learn of the existence of Dachau and Buchenwald. And those who are loudest in denouncing the German concentration camps are often quite unaware, or only very dimly aware, that there are also concentration camps in Russia. Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people, have actually escaped the attention of the majority of English russophiles. Many English people have heard almost nothing about the extermination of German and Polish Jews during the present war. Their own antisemitism has caused this vast crime to bounce off their consciousness. In nationalist thought there are facts which are both true and untrue, known and unknown. A known fact may be so unbearable that it is habitually pushed aside and not allowed to enter into logical processes, or on the other hand it may enter into every calculation and yet never be admitted as a fact, even in one's own mind.
Every nationalist is haunted by the belief that the past can be altered. He spends part of his time in a fantasy world in which things happen as they should — in which, for example, the Spanish Armada was a success or the Russian Revolution was crushed in 1918 — and he will transfer fragments of this world to the history books whenever possible. Much of the propagandist writing of our time amounts to plain forgery. Material facts are suppressed, dates altered, quotations removed from their context and doctored so as to change their meaning. Events which it is felt ought not to have happened are left unmentioned and ultimately denied(6). In 1927 Chiang Kai Shek boiled hundreds of Communists alive, and yet within ten years he had become one of the heroes of the Left. The re-alignment of world politics had brought him into the anti-Fascist camp, and so it was felt that the boiling of the Communists ‘didn't count’, or perhaps had not happened. The primary aim of propaganda is, of course, to influence contemporary opinion, but those who rewrite history do probably believe with part of their minds that they are actually thrusting facts into the past. When one considers the elaborate forgeries that have been committed in order to show that Trotsky did not play a valuable part in the Russian civil war, it is difficult to feel that the people responsible are merely lying. More probably they feel that their own version was what happened in the sight of God, and that one is justified in rearranging the records accordingly.
Indifference to objective truth is encouraged by the sealing-off of one part of the world from another, which makes it harder and harder to discover what is actually happening. There can often be a genuine doubt about the most enormous events. For example, it is impossible to calculate within millions, perhaps even tens of millions, the number of deaths caused by the present war. The calamities that are constantly being reported — battles, massacres, famines, revolutions — tend to inspire in the average person a feeling of unreality. One has no way of verifying the facts, one is not even fully certain that they have happened, and one is always presented with totally different interpretations from different sources. What were the rights and wrongs of the Warsaw rising of August 1944? Is it true about the German gas ovens in Poland? Who was really to blame for the Bengal famine? Probably the truth is discoverable, but the facts will be so dishonestly set forth in almost any newspaper that the ordinary reader can be forgiven either for swallowing lies or failing to form an opinion. The general uncertainty as to what is really happening makes it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs. Since nothing is ever quite proved or disproved, the most unmistakable fact can be impudently denied. Moreover, although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge, the nationalist is often somewhat uninterested in what happens in the real world. What he wants is to feel that his own unit is getting the better of some other unit, and he can more easily do this by scoring off an adversary than by examining the facts to see whether they support him. All nationalist controversy is at the debating-society level. It is always entirely inconclusive, since each contestant invariably believes himself to have won the victory. Some nationalists are not far from schizophrenia, living quite happily amid dreams of power and conquest which have no connection with the physical world.

I have examined as best as I can the mental habits which are common to all forms of nationalism. The next thing is to classify those forms, but obviously this cannot be done comprehensively. Nationalism is an enormous subject. The world is tormented by innumerable delusions and hatreds which cut across one another in an extremely complex way, and some of the most sinister of them have not yet impinged on the European consciousness. In this essay I am concerned with nationalism as it occurs among the English intelligentsia. In them, much more than in ordinary English people, it is unmixed with patriotism and therefore can be studied pure. Below are listed the varieties of nationalism now flourishing among English intellectuals, with such comments as seem to be needed. It is convenient to use three headings, Positive, Transferred, and Negative, though some varieties will fit into more than one category:

Positive Nationalism

(i) Neo-toryism. Exemplified by such people as Lord Elton, A. P. Herbert, G. M. Young, Professor Pickthorn, by the literature of the Tory Reform Committee, and by such magazines as the New English Review and the Nineteenth Century and After. The real motive force of neo-Toryism, giving it its nationalistic character and differentiating it from ordinary Conservatism, is the desire not to recognise that British power and influence have declined. Even those who are realistic enough to see that Britain's military position is not what it was, tend to claim that ‘English ideas’ (usually left undefined) must dominate the world. All neo-Tories are anti-Russian, but sometimes the main emphasis is anti-American. The significant thing is that this school of thought seems to be gaining ground among youngish intellectuals, sometimes ex-Communists, who have passed through the usual process of disillusionment and become disillusioned with that. The anglophobe who suddenly becomes violently pro-British is a fairly common figure. Writers who illustrate this tendency are F. A. Voigt, Malcolm Muggeridge, Evelyn Waugh, Hugh Kingsmill, and a psychologically similar development can be observed in T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and various of their followers.
(ii) Celtic Nationalism. Welsh, Irish and Scottish nationalism have points of difference but are alike in their anti-English orientation. Members of all three movements have opposed the war while continuing to describe themselves as pro-Russian, and the lunatic fringe has even contrived to be simultaneously pro-Russian and pro-Nazi. But Celtic nationalism is not the same thing as anglophobia. Its motive force is a belief in the past and future greatness of the Celtic peoples, and it has a strong tinge of racialism. The Celt is supposed to be spiritually superior to the Saxon — simpler, more creative, less vulgar, less snobbish, etc. — but the usual power hunger is there under the surface. One symptom of it is the delusion that Eire, Scotland or even Wales could preserve its independence unaided and owes nothing to British protection. Among writers, good examples of this school of thought are Hugh McDiarmid and Sean O'Casey. No modern Irish writer, even of the stature of Yeats or Joyce, is completely free from traces of nationalism.
(iii) Zionism. This the unusual characteristics of a nationalist movement, but the American variant of it seems to be more violent and malignant than the British. I classify it under Direct and not Transferred nationalism because it flourishes almost exclusively among the Jews themselves. In England, for several rather incongruous reasons, the intelligentsia are mostly pro-Jew on the Palestine issue, but they do not feel strongly about it. All English people of goodwill are also pro-Jew in the sense of disapproving of Nazi persecution. But any actual nationalistic loyalty, or belief in the innate superiority of Jews, is hardly to be found among Gentiles.

Transferred Nationalism

(i) Communism.
(ii) Political Catholicism.
(iii) Colour Feeling. The old-style contemptuous attitude towards ‘natives’ has been much weakened in England, and various pseudo-scientific theories emphasising the superiority of the white race have been abandoned(7). Among the intelligentsia, colour feeling only occurs in the transposed form, that is, as a belief in the innate superiority of the coloured races. This is now increasingly common among English intellectuals, probably resulting more often from masochism and sexual frustration than from contact with the Oriental and Negro nationalist movements. Even among those who do not feel strongly on the colour question, snobbery and imitation have a powerful influence. Almost any English intellectual would be scandalised by the claim that the white races are superior to the coloured, whereas the opposite claim would seem to him unexceptionable even if he disagreed with it. Nationalistic attachment to the coloured races is usually mixed up with the belief that their sex lives are superior, and there is a large underground mythology about the sexual prowess of Negroes.
(iv) Class Feeling. Among upper-class and middle-class intellectuals, only in the transposed form — i. e. as a belief in the superiority of the proletariat. Here again, inside the intelligentsia, the pressure of public opinion is overwhelming. Nationalistic loyalty towards the proletariat, and most vicious theoretical hatred of the bourgeoisie, can and often do co-exist with ordinary snobbishness in everyday life.
(v) Pacifism. The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to the taking of life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defence of western countries. The Russians, unlike the British, are not blamed for defending themselves by warlike means, and indeed all pacifist propaganda of this type avoids mention of Russia or China. It is not claimed, again, that the Indians should abjure violence in their struggle against the British. Pacifist literature abounds with equivocal remarks which, if they mean anything, appear to mean that statesmen of the type of Hitler are preferable to those of the type of Churchill, and that violence is perhaps excusable if it is violent enough. After the fall of France, the French pacifists, faced by a real choice which their English colleagues have not had to make, mostly went over to the Nazis, and in England there appears to have been some small overlap of membership between the Peace Pledge Union and the Blackshirts. Pacifist writers have written in praise of Carlyle, one of the intellectual fathers of Fascism. All in all it is difficult not to feel that pacifism, as it appears among a section of the intelligentsia, is secretly inspired by an admiration for power and successful cruelty. The mistake was made of pinning this emotion to Hitler, but it could easily be retransfered.

Negative Nationalism

(i) Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell ore when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
(ii) Anti-Semitism. There is little evidence about this at present, because the Nazi persecutions have made it necessary for any thinking person to side with the Jews against their oppressors. Anyone educated enough to have heard the word ‘antisemitism’ claims as a matter of course to be free of it, and anti-Jewish remarks are carefully eliminated from all classes of literature. Actually antisemitism appears to be widespread, even among intellectuals, and the general conspiracy of silence probably helps exacerbate it. People of Left opinions are not immune to it, and their attitude is sometimes affected by the fact that Trotskyists and Anarchists tend to be Jews. But antisemitism comes more naturally to people of Conservative tendency, who suspect Jews of weakening national morale and diluting the national culture. Neo-Tories and political Catholics are always liable to succumb to antisemitism, at least intermittently.
(iii) Trotskyism. This word is used so loosely as to include Anarchists, democratic Socialists and even Liberals. I use it here to mean a doctrinaire Marxist whose main motive is hostility to the Stalin regime. Trotskyism can be better studied in obscure pamphlets or in papers like the Socialist Appeal than in the works of Trotsky himself, who was by no means a man of one idea. Although in some places, for instance in the United States, Trotskyism is able to attract a fairly large number of adherents and develop into an organised movement with a petty fuerher of its own, its inspiration is essentially negative. The Trotskyist is against Stalin just as the Communist is for him, and, like the majority of Communists, he wants not so much to alter the external world as to feel that the battle for prestige is going in his own favour. In each case there is the same obsessive fixation on a single subject, the same inability to form a genuinely rational opinion based on probabilities. The fact that Trotskyists are everywhere a persecuted minority, and that the accusation usually made against them, i. e. of collaborating with the Fascists, is obviously false, creates an impression that Trotskyism is intellectually and morally superior to Communism; but it is doubtful whether there is much difference. The most typical Trotskyists, in any case, are ex-Communists, and no one arrives at Trotskyism except via one of the left-wing movements. No Communist, unless tethered to his party by years of habit, is secure against a sudden lapse into Trotskyism. The opposite process does not seem to happen equally often, though there is no clear reason why it should not.

In the classification I have attempted above, it will seem that I have often exaggerated, oversimplified, made unwarranted assumptions and have left out of account the existence of ordinarily decent motives. This was inevitable, because in this essay I am trying to isolate and identify tendencies which exist in all our minds and pervert our thinking, without necessarily occurring in a pure state or operating continuously. It is important at this point to correct the over-simplified picture which I have been obliged to make. To begin with, one has no right to assume that everyone, or even every intellectual, is infected by nationalism. Secondly, nationalism can be intermittent and limited. An intelligent man may half-succumb to a belief which he knows to be absurd, and he may keep it out of his mind for long periods, only reverting to it in moments of anger or sentimentality, or when he is certain that no important issues are involved. Thirdly, a nationalistic creed may be adopted in good faith from non-nationalistic motives. Fourthly, several kinds of nationalism, even kinds that cancel out, can co-exist in the same person.
All the way through I have said, ‘the nationalist does this’ or ‘the nationalist does that’, using for purposes of illustration the extreme, barely sane type of nationalist who has no neutral areas in his mind and no interest in anything except the struggle for power. Actually such people are fairly common, but they are not worth the powder and shot. In real life Lord Elton, D. N. Pritt, Lady Houston, Ezra Pound, Lord Vanisttart, Father Coughlin and all the rest of their dreary tribe have to be fought against, but their intellectual deficiencies hardly need pointing out. Monomania is not interesting, and the fact that no nationalist of the more bigoted kind can write a book which still seems worth reading after a lapse of years has a certain deodorising effect. But when one has admitted that nationalism has not triumphed everywhere, that there are still peoples whose judgements are not at the mercy of their desires, the fact does remain that the pressing problems — India, Poland, Palestine, the Spanish civil war, the Moscow trials, the American Negroes, the Russo-German Pact or what have you — cannot be, or at least never are, discussed upon a reasonable level. The Eltons and Pritts and Coughlins, each of them simply an enormous mouth bellowing the same lie over and over again, are obviously extreme cases, but we deceive ourselves if we do not realise that we can all resemble them in unguarded moments. Let a certain note be struck, let this or that corn be trodden on — and it may be corn whose very existence has been unsuspected hitherto — and the most fair-minded and sweet-tempered person may suddenly be transformed into a vicious partisan, anxious only to ‘score’ over his adversary and indifferent as to how many lies he tells or how many logical errors he commits in doing so. When Lloyd George, who was an opponent of the Boer War, announced in the House of Commons that the British communiques, if one added them together, claimed the killing of more Boers than the whole Boer nation contained, it is recorded that Arthur Balfour rose to his feet and shouted ‘Cad!’ Very few people are proof against lapses of this type. The Negro snubbed by a white woman, the Englishman who hears England ignorantly criticised by an American, the Catholic apologist reminded of the Spanish Armada, will all react in much the same way. One prod to the nerve of nationalism, and the intellectual decencies can vanish, the past can be altered, and the plainest facts can be denied.
If one harbours anywhere in one's mind a nationalistic loyalty or hatred, certain facts, although in a sense known to be true, are inadmissible. Here are just a few examples. I list below five types of nationalist, and against each I append a fact which it is impossible for that type of nationalist to accept, even in his secret thoughts:
BRITISH TORY: Britain will come out of this war with reduced power and prestige.
COMMUNIST: If she had not been aided by Britain and America, Russia would have been defeated by Germany.
IRISH NATIONALIST: Eire can only remain independent because of British protection.
TROTSKYIST: The Stalin regime is accepted by the Russian masses.
PACIFIST: Those who ‘abjure’ violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf.
All of these facts are grossly obvious if one's emotions do not happen to be involved: but to the kind of person named in each case they are also intolerable, and so they have to be denied, and false theories constructed upon their denial. I come back to the astonishing failure of military prediction in the present war. It is, I think, true to say that the intelligentsia have been more wrong about the progress of the war than the common people, and that they were more swayed by partisan feelings. The average intellectual of the Left believed, for instance, that the war was lost in 1940, that the Germans were bound to overrun Egypt in 1942, that the Japanese would never be driven out of the lands they had conquered, and that the Anglo-American bombing offensive was making no impression on Germany. He could believe these things because his hatred for the British ruling class forbade him to admit that British plans could succeed. There is no limit to the follies that can be swallowed if one is under the influence of feelings of this kind. I have heard it confidently stated, for instance, that the American troops had been brought to Europe not to fight the Germans but to crush an English revolution. One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool. When Hitler invaded Russia, the officials of the MOI issued ‘as background’ a warning that Russia might be expected to collapse in six weeks. On the other hand the Communists regarded every phase of the war as a Russian victory, even when the Russians were driven back almost to the Caspian Sea and had lost several million prisoners. There is no need to multiply instances. The point is that as soon as fear, hatred, jealousy and power worship are involved, the sense of reality becomes unhinged. And, as I have pointed out already, the sense of right and wrong becomes unhinged also. There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when ‘our’ side commits it. Even if one does not deny that the crime has happened, even if one knows that it is exactly the same crime as one has condemned in some other case, even if one admits in an intellectual sense that it is unjustified — still one cannot feel that it is wrong. Loyalty is involved, and so pity ceases to function.
The reason for the rise and spread of nationalism is far too big a question to be raised here. It is enough to say that, in the forms in which it appears among English intellectuals, it is a distorted reflection of the frightful battles actually happening in the external world, and that its worst follies have been made possible by the breakdown of patriotism and religious belief. If one follows up this train of thought, one is in danger of being led into a species of Conservatism, or into political quietism. It can be plausibly argued, for instance — it is even possibly true — that patriotism is an inoculation against nationalism, that monarchy is a guard against dictatorship, and that organised religion is a guard against superstition. Or again, it can be argued that no unbiased outlook is possible, that all creeds and causes involve the same lies, follies, and barbarities; and this is often advanced as a reason for keeping out of politics altogether. I do not accept this argument, if only because in the modern world no one describable as an intellectual can keep out of politics in the sense of not caring about them. I think one must engage in politics — using the word in a wide sense — and that one must have preferences: that is, one must recognise that some causes are objectively better than others, even if they are advanced by equally bad means. As for the nationalistic loves and hatreds that I have spoken of, they are part of the make-up of most of us, whether we like it or not. Whether it is possible to get rid of them I do not know, but I do believe that it is possible to struggle against them, and that this is essentially a moral effort. It is a question first of all of discovering what one really is, what one's own feelings really are, and then of making allowance for the inevitable bias. If you hate and fear Russia, if you are jealous of the wealth and power of America, if you despise Jews, if you have a sentiment of inferiority towards the British ruling class, you cannot get rid of those feelings simply by taking thought. But you can at least recognise that you have them, and prevent them from contaminating your mental processes. The emotional urges which are inescapable, and are perhaps even necessary to political action, should be able to exist side by side with an acceptance of reality. But this, I repeat, needs a moral effort, and contemporary English literature, so far as it is alive at all to the major issues of our time, shows how few of us are prepared to make it.
1945
_____
1) Nations, and even vaguer entities such as Catholic Church or the proleteriat, are commonly thought of as individuals and often referred to as ‘she’. Patently absurd remarks such as ‘Germany is naturally treacherous’ are to be found in any newspaper one opens and reckless generalization about national character (‘The Spaniard is a natural aristocrat’ or ‘Every Englishman is a hypocrite’) are uttered by almost everyone. Intermittently these generalizations are seen to be unfounded, but the habit of making them persists, and people of professedly international outlook, e.g., Tolstoy or Bernard Shaw, are often guilty of them. [back]
2) A few writers of conservative tendency, such as Peter Drucker, foretold an agreement between Germany and Russia, but they expected an actual alliance or amalgamation which would be permanent. No Marxist or other left-wing writer, of whatever colour, came anywhere near foretelling the Pact. [back]
3) The military commentators of the popular press can mostly be classified as pro-Russian or anti-Russianm pro-blimp or anti-blimp. Such errors as believing the Mrginot Line impregnable, or predicting that Russia would conquer Germany in three months, have failed to shake their reputation, because they were always saying what their own particular audience wanted to hear. The two military critics most favoured by the intelligentsia are Captain Liddell Hart and Major-General Fuller, the first of whom teachs that the defence is stronger that the attack, and the second that the attack is stronger that the defence. This contradiction has not prevented both of them from being accepted as authorities by the sme public. The secret reason for their vogue in left-wing circles is that both of them are at odds with the War Office. [back]
4) Certain Americans have expressed dissatisfaction because ‘Anglo-American’ is the form of combination for these two words. It has been proposed to submite ‘Americo-British’.[back]
5) The News Chronicle advised its readers to visit the news film at which the entire execution could be witnessed, with close-ups. The Star published with seeming approval photographs of nearly naked female collaborationists being baited by the Paris mob. These photographs had a marked resemblance to the Nazi photographs of Jews being baited by the Berlin mob. [back]
6) En example is the Russo-German Pact, which is being effaced as quickly as possible from public memory. A Russian correspondent informs me that mention of the Pact is already being omitted from Russian year-books which table recent political events. [back]
7) A good example is the sunstroke superstition. Until recently it was believed that the white races were much more liable to sunstroke that the coloured, and that a white man could not safely walk about in tropical sunshine without a pith helmet. There was no evidence whatever for this theory, but it served the purpose of accentuating the difference between ‘natives’ and Europeans. During the war the theory was quietly dropped and whole armies manoeuvred in the tropics without pith helmets. So long as the sunstroke superstition survived, English doctors in India appear to have believed in it as firmly as laymen. [back]
THE END
____BD____
George Orwell: ‘Notes on Nationalism’
First published: Polemic. — GB, London. — May 1945.
Reprinted:
— ‘England Your England and Other Essays’. — 1953.
Text copied with thanks from http://orwell.ru/library/essays/nationalism/english/ 
© 1999-2015 www.orwell.ru

Wednesday 3 August 2016

Robots stealing all the jobs? - Nationalisation is the Answer, not a Basic Income


In the last year there has been increased discussion about introducing a 'Universal Basic Income' (or UBI). A Universal Basic Income would be a replacement for welfare where everyone gets an amount of money, say £100 a week, from the government as a right, just for being a citizen of the country. Unlike current welfare there are no conditions to meet to get it, either of age, or income, or anything else, and everyone gets the same. It is much simpler than current welfare, and the idea is to give people enough money to live on, just, to free people from the fear of destitution regardless of circumstances.

It is a rather expensive idea, but one that has significance advantages in areas such as simplicity and reliability. Recently, a perhaps unexpected source of support has come in the shape of various internet and technology billionaires, millionaires, etc. These captains of cyber-industry are worried about what happens if robots take all our jobs. They think, as do some others, that the rapid development of artificial intelligence and robotics will, over the next few decades, rapidly put most people out of work, not just in manufacturing, agriculture or low skilled services, but even in previously safe white-collar professions like Law, Medicine, Accounting, or whatever. They fear this will lead to a society where an increasingly tiny group of capitalists own all the robots, and everyone else is unemployed and penniless.

(Credit: Shutterstock/Salon)
Funnily the main negative thing our app-overlords have noticed about this is that if we're reduced to a vast penniless underclass there will be nobody who can afford to buy the products their army of robots and AIs produce. Hence their support for a UBI, to re-close the circle between production, purchase and consumption. Coincidentally, apart from the UBI part, this is exactly what Karl Marx thought would happen to Capitalism in the late 19th Century, but quite obviously didn't. Hence the failure of Marxism.

Ignore for a moment the obvious problem with this vision: that technology has been wiping out jobs en masse since 1750 but we haven't run out of jobs yet. The 'Tech' crowd's response is still ludicrously complicated when you think about it. UBIs are horribly expensive, so this would require massive taxation to pay for it. But if most of the population are penniless then the tax burden will have to fall heavily on the people with the money i.e. the tiny number of hyper-capitalists. So these people would be paying massive taxes, so the money can be distributed to everyone, so they can buy stuff, so the tiny minority can make massive profits on their capital, a large proportion of which would go in massive taxes, so the money could be redistributed, and so on.

It's worth noting at this point that the contemporary world is historically unique in that our aristocratic elite is both socially and economically liberal. That means they all like to think of themselves as nice, progressive people, but they also love venture capital, initial public offerings, and, oh yes, hate taxes. So I'll let you guess how long this re-distributive scheme would last before the elite decide that serfdom isn't so unthinkable after all.

But anyway, back to our dystopian future. So almost everyone has lost their jobs because robots can produce and provide goods and services of all kinds cheaper than human beings can. This means there pretty much is no problem of scarcity anymore, because AI can do basically everything. In this case there is a simpler solution than UBI, and it's called Socialism.

If we ever reach the point where most jobs disappear and capital is concentrated among a tiny elite who own all the robots and software, then we should just nationalise the robots and the software. That cuts out the ludicrous circularity of the UBI scheme (giving money to people, so they can give it to plutocrats, who give it back to the people, so, the whole process can go round again).  This all seems designed purely to keep money and power concentrated within a tiny, pseudo-aristocratic elite after real competitive capitalism has ended. Just nationalise them and then, once the robots are in common ownership, just use them to make stuff and provide services and just credit everyone directly from the output thus cutting the fat-cats out of the loop entirely. Problem Solved.

Now, I'm a right-wing, conservative, free-marketeer, so why am I suggesting socialist revolution if things go a certain way? For the answer we have to go back to Marx. The main problem with Marx's prediction that socialist revolution was inevitable was that it was based on assumptions about how economic development would occur . . . that were all wrong. A pretty large flaw. Marx thought capital would be consistently concentrated in fewer and fewer hands while wages were driven down more and more, until the whole system collapsed under its own inequality. But even his own data in Das Kapital showed that wasn't happening, real wages for workers were rising, as was their wealth (albeit from a very low base) and by the time of the Russian Revolution history clearly wasn't panning out how Marx predicted. According to his own theory revolution should happen in the most advanced societies. According to Marx Russia was the last place revolution should occur. Even more contrary to Marx Capitalism has chugged along more-or-less happily for the last 130 years, spreading wealth and raising incomes dramatically. But should this process go dramatically into reverse in the future then Marx's solution might be the right idea after all.

Free-market capitalism relies on competition among agents to generate the best prices and direct consumption and investment to best deal with the problems of economic scarcity. In all western societies this private, competitive mode of operation is balanced with democratic state control in areas where free-market provision can't cope. But in the robots-steal-all-the-jobs scenario competition and scarcity have rapidly vanished. Software putting everyone out of work would imply a massive increase in productivity had been achieved, as machines do the jobs cheaper than humans could so there would be little danger in damaging further economic growth. Economic growth doesn't matter so much if everyone has plenty anyway, while the democratic argument, that we can't allow the economy to be dominated by a handful of Mark Zuckerbergs while everyone else sinks into poverty, becomes far stronger as capital is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.

At this point we should just nationalise companies as they reach a certain size and stability and effective competition recedes (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, anyone?). This could potentially even just take the form of nationalising certain patents or pieces of intellectual property, in terms of software. The original owners should be reasonably compensated but control should  pass into democratic hands, cutting out the fat-cats, and ensuring general control of the economy remains with the wide public. The economy would generally remain private, and competition would remain because nationalisation would be piecemeal, rather than by whole economic sectors (e.g. the Steel Industry). Businesses would remain managed much as before, allowing employees to research and develop improvements to products, and the state could allow them to shrink and go bust if necessary, because there would be a pool of further businesses or inventions to be nationalised. This should largely avoid the problems faced by classical post-war 'mixed' economies. The main difference would be that once a company or piece of intellectual property had been sufficiently developed, instead of owners being able to just sit back and live off a stream of profits perpetually, they would be effectively bought out by the state in a one-off, reasonable payment.

The majority of people would enjoy comfortable existences doing some limited work but largely supported by a vast army of robots and AI. Thus we would fulfil Marx's dream and eventually, as technology developed further, glide gently beyond Socialism to a state of prosperous democratic control, communism in the sense Marx originally meant it. Bliss.

Or alternatively the soothsayers may be wrong. Mass unemployment may not rapidly spread over the next few decades due to a shortage of work to do, and ownership of capital may not become rapidly concentrated among a plutocratic elite. If that happens we should not embrace Socialism and should just carry on more or less as we do now. Sorry.

Sunday 3 July 2016

Brexit, one week later.

1. Initial signs of Economic Chaos were overblown.

As of now the FTSE 100 has more than recovered all its losses, and the smaller FTSE 250 is only down 3.5% on pre-Brexit, taking it back to where it was in March 2015. The Pound is down against the Euro, but only to where it was in early 2014; it is historically down against the Dollar, but this should help boost UK competitiveness for exports. We will not know for months what impact it is having in underlying UK growth though. We could already be in (moderate) recession.

2. Political Chaos continues at full force though.

The Tories and Labour are both effectively leaderless, the government has temporarily ceased functioning, and the SNP are trying to destabilise things further. It is possible that Theresa May will be crowned PM within a week, but more likely the Conservative leadership election will go on until September. Democratically speaking, the Tories and Labour should both sort out their leadership problems, and then a General Election should be fought on different visions for Brexit. Economically this just risks eking out complete uncertainty until Christmas, with further negative economic effects. Economically we want to trigger Article 50 and get some things decided as soon as possible.

3. Obvious first steps.

It seems to me the following should be announced ASAP to reduce uncertainty now. Firstly, EU citizens currently in Britain should be guaranteed 'permanent leave to remain' post-Brexit, contingent on an equivalent guarantee from EU states for our citizens. Anything else is just playing games with people's lives. Secondly, the British government should promise to replace all EU funding on current projects in Britain with British money from our EU contributions. This will mostly be academic grants, infrastructure projects and agricultural subsidies. Thirdly, the government should announce all EU laws will be retained in UK law immediately post-Brexit, though after that they may be changed by the usual UK mechanisms. (Obviously not including those laws about our relation to EU institutions).

4. Our Further Negotiating Position

Given the state of the vote, I believe it is clear we should be pursuing the highest degree of economic links and co-operation in areas of law & order, science, environmental measures, visa-free travel, etc consistent with severing constitutional links and ending the total right of free-movement and settlement. If there was no right of unlimited immigration into the UK the Remain side would've won by a landslide. If the only issue was Free Movement then Leave would've won by a landslide. The only decent democratic thing to do seems to be to maximise and balance these truths. Given we already completely comply with EU law it should not be beyond the EU or the UK to reach a full agreement within the two years (though it will certainly be difficult). Brexit threatens the EU economy almost as much as it threatens ours, and the Eurozone is arguably in a worse position to deal with it.

Positively in the wider world there have already been expressions of interest in closer trade links with the UK from Australia, New Zealand, the US, and Iceland (assuming I haven't missed any). Negotiations with these states should start immediately. Someone suggested that there just aren't enough staff in Whitehall to do this, compared to in the EU. Hire some more then. Wider trade relations was meant to be one of the key advantages of Brexit. We can't afford not to at least try to make a strong effort at this.

Overall Brexit may turn out alright. But it certainly can be botched. As with many political choices how it's carried out and how other countries respond will be crucial to success. Our overall fate for better or worse was not simply determined on the 23rd June.

Oh, and please, for the love of God, no more Br-exit puns. No Bremain, No Bregret, No Scexit (Scottish, you get the idea).  Just stop it, stop it now. Thank you.      

Tuesday 7 June 2016

The Future of Greater European Union

I have very mixed feelings about the EU and the referendum on UK membership.  I feel that we don't really want 'In' or 'Out' of the EU. We want co-operation with other European countries without getting dragged into Brussels' incompetent empire building.  We neither want to be dragged into the Eurozone, or the Schengen agreement, or an EU army, or a banking union, or any other of myriad EU schemes for closer union. Neither do we want to end up entirely outside the European community, unable to engage in academic co-operation, free-trade, law enforcement co-operation, visa-free travel, or lose all say on a wide-range of technical standards.

The Leave campaign wants to persuade us that we could retain the good things we want while losing the bad things we don't want. The Remain campaigns wants to pesuade us we don't have that option and if we want the good bits we have to take the bad as well. I don't know which is right. But a better, more long-term question is, firstly, why isn't there a better option than either?  Why can't we be in a European Community, with some limited say over how it works, without constantly having to fight to avoid being dragged into an 'ever closer union'? This question is intimately tied up with another important question. Where will the EU itself be in twenty or thirty years time? And where should it be? How can we make a long-term decision to stay if we don't know what we're getting in to.

Frankly, nobody answers these question because the EU basically has an unofficial plan of not having a long-term plan. The EU's model for european unity has always been deliberately one-step-at-a-time. Looking where you're going might just terrify you, and lead to an almighty argument about the choice of destination, but if you concentrate on taking each step you get there eventually. Closer union does not advance with any big bang, but with a directive here, an agreement there, power after power, slowly standardised and shifted to Brussels. This approach has its advantages but the chaos of the Eurozone crisis and the refugee crisis, not to mention the risk of Brexit, and eurosceptic sentiment in countries like France, the Netherlands and Denmark, suggests it is no longer up to the job, to say the least. Obviously the future is uncertain, especially the future of the EU, but there are some things we can be reasonably sure of. And that offers an answer to the first question as well as the second.

This is the EU and Eurozone as it stands. The Eurozone in dark blue, the rest of the EU in light blue.





The European Union has expanded since 1953 when it was just France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux countries. From 6 countries it has now expanded to 28 and it is clear what further expansion plans there are. The remaining Yugolsav countries are only still outside the EU because of their low political and economic development, largely a result of the terrifying wars of the early 90's. Slovenia and Croatia have already been absorbed, and the rest almost certainly will. As will, eventually, the bits of Ukraine that Russia can't detach. In ten to twenty years the EU will most likely look like this.




At this point EU expansion hits a block though. It runs out of small European countries to swallow up. The only ones left on its borders are either vast and foreign (Russia and its satellites, Turkey) or have already said no (Switzerland, Norway, etc). All the east-european countries have signed up to join the euro so I'm assuming they will eventually, though this part of the picture is more uncertain. The EU will not just be geographically larger, it will be more integrated as well. 'Ever Closer Union' is the EU's one creed and it will work out its inevitable logic, slowly but surely. Even the EU's most serious troubles, the Eurozone and migration crises, have only fuelled the calls and need for ever closer union. Within twenty years we will probably have, and I would say, should have, the workings of a fully fledged European Superstate.

Not a strong federal state, a United States of Europe, it will never be that centralised or constitutionally uniform, its central government will still be weak compared to the member states. More like a European Confederacy, a diverse multi-lingual block with a central government whose brief is purely to manage cross-state relations and issues and represent their interests to the wider world, not to take precise and detailed control over everyone's lives and money. It will be more like a giant Switzerland than a European US, though still with its own common currency, banking system, central bank, scientific program, space agency, external border, trade policy, legislature, technical standards, immigration and asylum policy, army, agricultural policy, limited fiscal transfers, etc. More than enough to be getting on with.

And, for most European countries, this would be a good thing. Most of them are small, recent inventions, who are entirely surrounded by fellow EU neighbours and have neither the need nor the expertise, nor any interest in running their own currency, or their own foreign policy, or even their own armed forces. The 21st century will increasingly be dominated large states: America, China, India, Russia. These are many tens of times the size of Slovenia, or Belgium. On their own they'll get squashed but together the European Confederacy can stand toe-to-toe with the other great powers of the world.

A future in the European Confederacy is not for everyone though. Britain, whether it votes Leave or Remain on 23rd June, will not be in the European Confederacy. We're already outside the Euro and Schengen zones, and between the renegotiation, and the referendum lock the distance between us and the core of EU countries is only going to grow. It is likely that more and more decisions will be taken within the EU core and we will be increasingly side-lined. If we vote Remain we'll end up a semi-detached formal member of the EU, but outside the European Confederacy including almost the entire rest of the EU, a leviathan stretching from the Channel to Ukraine with the Euro as its currency. If we leave we'll most likely end up in the EEA or EFTA, in a very similar position, with a modicum more freedom to act outside the EU and a modicum less ability to influence policy inside the EU. This will leave the European Confederacy ringed by states to whom it is closely linked but either, to its north have chosen not to join 'ever closer union' (Britain, Norway, Iceland, Switzerland, possibly Denmark and Sweden), or, to its East, are too large and alien to be satisfactorily integrated (Russia, Turkey).

Turkey, for example, has been inching towards EU membership since the 1960s, first formally applied for membership in 1987, and is currently in the customs union with the EU. I consider it very unlikely that Turkey will become a full EU member any time in the next twenty years or more. Turkey is no poorer than Bulgaria or Romania, but it has 80 million people compared to 26 million between the two of them, all of whom would be eligible for free-movement across a continent that has become paranoid about immigration. Turkey has a border that stretches into Northern Iraq and Syria about which the less said the better. It has a conservative Muslim population with cultural views predominating very different to that in the rest of the EU, a problem with military influence on the government, a repressive policy towards its large Kurdish minority, which responds in turn with a terrorist insurgency. Its sheer size and poverty means that it would immediately become the largest EU country and the poorest, making it eligible for a huge portion of the EU budget, draining money away from every other country, and the most powerful country in the EU parliament, as well as the Council of Ministers, etc.

All of these are good reasons why giving Turkey full membership of the EU would be a bad idea, and more prosaically, why it will be blocked by other EU states at any point in the foreseeable future. Similar considerations apply to Russia, even if at some point in the next generation they drop their antagonistic stance to Europe. But that doesn't mean that the EU shouldn't have close, friendly relations and co-operation with both Britain, Turkey, EFTA and possibly others. It should, for both our and their interests. It's just that none of these states, for very different reasons, is going to be part of Euroschengenland.

The obvious answer to this problem is a two-speed European community. There should be an inner core, a very large one, of states continuing 'ever closer union', moving towards a sort of European Confederacy, and an outlier of states semi-connected to the European Confederacy, forming a wider European Community. This already kind of exists. It's kind of like the relation between the EU and EFTA, and it's kind of like the relation between the Eurozone and the non-euro EU (like us). But formally it's neither. Formally the EU has opposed any idea of a two-tier Europe in the hope that everyone would move inexorably towards the same goal. That's why the EU requires all new members to eventually join the Euro, even if they have no wish to do so. That's why they talk in terms of Turkey eventually becoming just another EU country, even though for obvious practical reasons they've been blocking it for thirty and more years. That's why people in Brussels still hope we'll eventually join the Euro even though that will obviously never happen.

Accepting a two-tier Europe would be, in a very limited sense, accepting defeat, and so they are psychologically resistant to it. But the time when that has been a useful response has long since passed. Greater European Union can no longer be built on sheer stubborn insistence but must accept that certain countries cannot or do not want to fit into one size fits all. It would have obvious advantages for both the Euro-core and the European periphery. Instead of having different legal and institutional bases for relations with each of Britain, Norway & Iceland, Switzerland, Turkey, it would simplify and unify relations between the European core and periphery on a stable permanent basis, while allowing a degree of flexibility and independence. This map shows the countries that may be involved in such a system, with the European Confederacy in dark blue and the states around its borders with close semi-linked relations in light blue.




But how could a two tier Europe work? Issues and policy areas would be divided into two groups. There would be a cluster of policy and governance areas that would be bound together and form the province of the European Confederacy. These would include the following areas: currency, banking system, central bank, external border, trade policy, legislature, cabinet, free-movement zone, immigration and asylum policy, army, agricultural policy, fishing policy, structural support grants. These areas would be under supranational control under whatever rules the European Confederacy wanted to use, presumably with strengthened versions of current EU institutions: EU parliament, EU commission, EU Councils, civil service, court, etc. Brussels would be its sole capital and parliament seat, Commissioners could be democratically elected from each country to increase EU legitimacy. The EU confederacy would be recognised globally as a single sovereign state, with a single UN seat, probably a permanent security council one. It would be in NATO, and would generally have a role commensurate with its status as one of the largest, wealthiest and most powerful countries in the world.

It would sit on a second layer, that of the European Community, including the Euro-Confederacy and all the states around it I've discussed. This would share a free-trade area, a scientific programme, a wide range of technical standards, a space agency, crime and terrorism co-operation, minimum environmental standards and co-operation, the European Convention of Human Rights, Eurovision, etc. It would make a modest contribution to the Euro-Confederacy budget, or some formally separate budget to fund these activities but would not be financially on the hook for Euro-confederacy policy areas or issues. Community decisions would be taken inter-governmentally by councils of the relevant government ministers. Decisions could then be taken unaninmously, or by some super-majority of both the Confederacy and Community states, or whatever. Community states would be represented by their own governments and not have either parliament or commission representation in Community decision-making. The Euro-confederacy would lead for the whole Community on limited international issues with the approval of those governments and Community nations that wanted to integrate further in specific areas, such as Switzerland's membership of Schengen, could do so on an individual, negotiated basis.

Community to Confederacy relations would then be a cross between Norway's current relation to the EU and Britain's current relation to the EU core. The obvious question then is why would the much larger Euro-Confederacy choose to negotiate with the Community fringe, rather than just dictating terms as we are told they do to Norway?  Well partly because the Community would be much larger than Norway, including all the EFTA states, Britain, Turkey, and possibly Sweden, Denmark and others. These would be a relatively formidable block on its own, and thus harder to dictate to than little Norway. Largely though because the Euro-confederacy would gain little from treating the Community badly, but would gain from agreed co-operation. The areas I've mentioning as community areas are largely uncontroversial, and the Euro-confederacy would make its own economic and political surrounds more secure and productive by formally co-operating with the states around it under one system, which allowed it to concentrate on internal integration and its problems, and would gain little, and just annoy its neighbours, by bullying them or pushing them around.

Community countries would gain a sustainable, formal relationship with the Euro-confederacy that combined limited control and input on community issues with wide sovereignty on everything else, but hopefully also maximise the benefit they gain from access to European markets and scientific and other co-operation. Perhaps the other objection that might be raised then is what incentive would this leave to actually join the Euro-confederacy if countries could have such a relationship? Well, because they genuinely want and would benefit from the closer co-operation and integration that the Euro-confederacy provides. Particularly, it would be necessary if they wanted the Euro. The EU cannot and should not operate by trying to keep states inside by blackmailing them with threats of terrible revenge if they leave or choose to stay outside. The euro-confederacy can only work in the long-term, like any state, if all its parts are happy to be inside. The EU would probably operate better by moderately increasing the distance to its most eurosceptic and awkward members like Britain, thus allowing it to focus EU institutions on making closer integration work, as well as having a formal, permanent semi-status for countries it does not want to fully integrate like Turkey.        

It's impossible to tell what countries will choose to fully integrate into the Euro-confederacy and which will not in the next 30 or so years. Maybe Russia will join the Community or maybe not. Maybe Sweden and Denmark will join the Euro-confederacy, or maybe Euro membership will be the dividing line, and like Britain they will find themselves moving increasingly away from the EU-core as integration centres around establishing the necessary governance institutions to support the Euro. The exact borders of each group don't really matter. But I think a formal two-tiered Europe is inevitable and beneficial, and it would be better to formalise close links with states outside the EU-core (Britain, Norway, Switzerland, Turkey, at least) rather than engage in a self-defeating all-or-nothing mentality that will eventually drive them further away.

It is possible that if Britain votes Leave, the EU will cut off ties as far as possible to punish us, and it is possible that if we vote Remain they will take this as the best chance to force us into closer integration.  Both would be foolish and counter-productive approaches: the geo-political equivalent of cutting off their nose to spite their face. Given that there is going to be further integration in the EU core, and that Britain is not going to be involved with this, and both EFTA and Turkey will still exist as well, if not other non-Euro countries, then some kind of two tier Europe will exist and deepen anyway, better to approach the problem explicitly and create the separate governance institutions that will allow such a relationship to continue sustainably for the decades to come.